The illustration above is featured in the book The Future World of Agriculture (Walt Disney World EPCOT Center book), published in 1984.
The farmer in this artist's conception of a farm of the future sits in his computer room (right), studying images of his fields beamed down from a small Landsat satellite. The red spots on the screen indicate crop stress that needs to be corrected. With the aid of his computer, which processes the data and suggests a solution, the farmers solves the problem. Robots in the field (one is seen at far left) take the corrective action ordered by the farmer. At center, the farmer's wife and child talk to the operator of a huge farm machine used for plowing and planting.
5 comments:
This is a great picture but one of the best "farms of the future" artist conceptions I have seen was in a 1970 National Geographic. I will check out my local library this weekend to see if I can dig it out.
If his crops are stressed, maybe they need a nice comfy lounge chair hung from a ceiling to rest in.
I worked for John Deere until a couple of years ago, and the 'robot tractors' are almost a reality. The tractors they now sell will follow the rows using GPS, and the operator can just sit back and relax until the end of the row is reached. Then the operator turns the tractor and the process repeats.
Intensive research is being done to handle the turns. Once that's done and the whole thing is 99.999% reliable, the tractors will be programmable and autonomous.
Hey, this isn't so far off, we just purchased a GPS steering system for our tractor. It would be really nice if it was fully automated and you could do some launch chair farming.
Gotta love the dubs on the truck too. (Pretty shiny for a farm truck too!)
Post a Comment